☕️ AMBUSHED ☙ Friday, November 28, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A special edition roundup of news about the DC shootings, the hard-to-find reliable information, and the logical extrapolations. It's a very odd set of coincidences.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! I hope you enjoyed a joyful and meaningful Thanksgiving yesterday, wherever you are. Today you can enjoy the next bit of classic modern Americana: it is so-called “Black Friday,” a celebration of consumerism. Time to get your shopping on and cross as much off your Christmas list as possible. The Childers family is still recovering from the holiday, and there was another news-cycle-grabbing event that is submerged in hot takes and piecemeal reporting. So this morning’s roundup is a special edition— everything you need to know about Wednesday’s DC shootings. Let’s slice right through the fog of hot takes.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, the New York Times ran an explosive story headlined, “For Shooting Suspect, a Long Path of Conflict From Afghanistan to America.” You don’t say. The sub-headline added, “Rahmanullah Lakanwal was among the Afghans who came to the US after the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. Earlier, he served in a paramilitary unit that worked with U.S. forces.” I’ll give you one guess which three-letter agency directly supervised Lakanwal’s unit.

It’s one of social media’s hottest stories, and it is hogging the headlines, but it’s unaccountably hard to find the full story in one place. Here’s what happened.

Around 2:15 p.m. on Wednesday (the day before Thanksgiving), three West Virginia National Guard members were on foot patrol near the entrance to the Farragut West Metro station, just a few blocks from the White House, in the middle of a busy downtown pre-holiday afternoon. People moved in and out of the station, innocently doing their various business, traffic hummed along 17th Street, when a man suddenly sprang from around a corner holding a powerful .357‑caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and opened fire.

It was an ambush. A bold ambush; he attacked two trained soldiers carrying automatic rifles using a revolver. It was also a skilled ambush. Both successful shots were head shots. He attacked with a revolver that probably held only six rounds. (After he downed the first soldier and ran out of shots, Lakanwal coolly scooped up her sidearm and kept firing.)

Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, was dropped where she stood; the gunman then leaned over her and fired again as she lay on the pavement. The second Guard member to fall, Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, 24, tried to take cover behind a nearby bus stop shelter but was shot multiple times as the attacker kept firing.

Security video showed the two Guardsmen collapsing, with the shooter standing over his first victim before shifting fire to the second, while bystanders ducked and scattered.

The third Guard member in the patrol unit was not hit in the initial burst. While the attacker focused on the downed soldiers, the third Guardsman drew his weapon and returned fire. Then other nearby Guard troops rushed in, bringing the gunman down in a brief but violent exchange. Some platforms reported an unarmed National Guard Major raced to the scene from two blocks away and subdued the shooter using his pocketknife; but I couldn’t confirm that report in any major outlets.

Within moments, the suspect —29‑year‑old Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal— was on the ground, wounded and disarmed, shot in the leg and butt, while Guardsmen and police moved to secure the scene and perform life‑saving care on Beckstrom and Wolfe.

On the sidewalk near Farragut Square, Guard members and first responders worked on the two critically injured soldiers as sirens converged on the block, with bystander phone videos capturing CPR and frantic medical care before both were rushed to the hospital. Lakanwal was hospitalized under guard.

Sarah died in the hospital last night. Andrew remains in critical condition.

🔥 Lakanwal first entered the U.S. in 2021 through Operation Allies Welcome, a hastily arranged and poorly considered Biden-era immigration program that resettled thousands of Afghans who had helped the U.S. during the war, and feared payback from Taliban forces following the Biden Scurry. More than seventy-six thousand Afghans were ‘rapidly resettled’ into the U.S. under the program.

Lakanwal was located in Bellingham, Washington, laundered through the tender mercies of a Lutheran NGO called “World Relief,” which, as far as I can tell, in recent years received the vast majority of its funding from the U.S. government, and recently complained it might have to close or “drastically scale back operations” after USAID was shuttered. The charity was founded in 1944; USAID has nearly killed it.

Until August, Lakanwal worked as an independent contractor for Amazon Flex, a gig job of delivering packages. According to reports, Lakwanwal lived in Bellingham with his wife and several children, all unnamed, whose whereabouts are, so far as we know, unknown.

When he was in Afghanistan, Lakanwal was trained by U.S. intelligence agencies and served in an elite “Zero Unit,” which was a blend of deep-black special ops and dirty work at the crossroads. He was stationed at “Firebase Gecko,” a military compound used by the CIA and Kandahar special forces. Zero Units were outside the military chain of command, and reported to the Afghan National Directorate of Security, or NDS, an intelligence agency propped up with CIA backing for Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government.

In other words, he was a highly-trained, licensed-to-kill spook with extremely esoteric skills. A sort of third-world James Bond, if James Bond had been a Middle Eastern terrorist.

“He previously worked with the US government, including CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed in a statement yesterday. That admission was a teensy bit understated. He did more than “work with” the CIA.

A former senior Afghan general told CBS News yesterday that the Zero Units “were the most active and professional forces, trained and equipped by the CIA. All their operations were conducted under the CIA command.” The CBS story reported these “units were known in Afghanistan for their secrecy and alleged brutality, and members were implicated in numerous extrajudicial killings of civilians.” Human Rights Watch has accused the Zero Units of the most serious and brutal rights violations (the CIA denies this and claims it is Taliban propaganda).

In 2018, the New York Times ran a feature story about Zero Units’ war crimes and excesses:

So, Lakanwal was a spook, a brute squad boy, and an assassin. He probably made a lot of local enemies. You can understand why he’d be nervous about sticking around after the Taliban took over.

According to the Times, a ‘childhood friend’ identified only as Muhammad said that Lakanwal suffered from mental health issues because of the casualties his unit had caused. “He would tell me and our friends that their military operations were very tough, their job was very difficult, and they were under a lot of pressure,” Muhammad said.

I’ll just say this once. It was reckless to the point of insanity to allow a trained radical terrorist with known mental health problems to operate unsupervised in the continental United States. Assuming, of course, that he was unsupervised.

A long, dramatic 2022 Propublica article about the Zero Units cited its fighters saying they saw Americans as infidels, never trusted us, but worked with us as a lesser evil or a useful path to a “new Afghanistan.” A 2023 Washington Post storyabout relocated Zero Unit fighters described them as feeling angry and frustrated, feeling “abandoned” by the Biden Administration. “We are losing our minds,” one former unit commander told WaPo.

“There are times when I just think to myself, ‘Just drive your truck into a wall,’” another former Zero Unit fighter said. Other former fighters reported that their families were going hungry while overworked resettlement agency caseworkers didn’t return their phone calls.

Perfect. Just what we need! Angry and frustrated elite jihadi fighters trained by the CIA who never liked America to begin with. What could go wrong?

In a sane world, a dangerous radical with his elite training and trauma history would not just be airdropped into Bellingham with a caseworker and a benefits packet. He’d go through a years‑long, resourced process combining disarmament, psychological repair, close monitoring, and deliberate re‑anchoring into a nonviolent civilian identity. What do you want to bet none of those things happened?

Currently, nobody knows why Lakanwal drove 2,500 miles from Bellingham, Washington to Washington, DC to shoot National Guardsmen. If he was just feeling hopeless about his immigration status and life here among the infidels, it was a bloody strange way to show it. He’s currently awake but not cooperating.

The Times reported that Lakanwal’s neighbors said the FBI first sent a “drone and wheeled robot into the apartment,” which means they suspected he might’ve booby-trapped the place. Not surprising. After all, since we trained him, we should know what he’s capable of.

🔥 The assassinations ignited a powder keg of political fury. Yesterday, President Trump had a lot to say about it, both on- and offline, including that he will ‘permanently pause’ (not sure what that means) all migration from third-world countries. Here’s the first half of Trump’s Truth Social post (in the even spicier second half, he called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “retarded” and mentioned Ilhan Omar’s brother):

“Frankly, the whole Afghanistan situation was a mess. It should have never happened. We would have got out with strength and decency and precision,” Trump said in a fiery presser (wherein he called the reporter a ‘stupid person’).

CLIP: Trump reacts angrily when reporter asks why Republicans are blaming Biden’s disgraceful scramble out of Kabul (1:15).

The unstated point was that the only reason we had to suddenly fly 70,000 unvetted Afghans into the U.S. without a meaningful deprogramming and integration system was because of how badly Biden handled our retreat from Afghanistan. It could have been done much better; it could hardly have been done any worse.

In response to the shooting, in addition to the “permanent immigration pause,” President Trump also called for a “full-scale, rigorous re-examination” of all green card and asylum cases from “countries of concern,” which includes Afghanistan. That all seems prudent.

As night follows day, Democrats blamed Republicans. To the extent I can follow their logic, they’re arguing that Republicans enraged Lakanwal —who lived in Washington State— by deploying armed National Guardsmen to Washington, DC (where he did not live). They cluck their tongues, deplore the violence, and regretfully conclude the DC law enforcement crackdown has just provoked more crime. In other words, what did you expect?

The hot takes are off the charts. Online, conservatives and progressives all distrust the official stories and muse about conspiracies. (For different reasons, of course.)

🔥 Let’s begin the analysis with the obvious fact that most CIA-trained Afghan refugees did not shoot any National Guardsmen. So.

The layers of irony are layered more densely than an above-average onion. Lakanwal used the same special assassination skills that we taught him to kill two innocent, well-meaning young soldiers who had never troubled him at all. Why not shoot his negligent caseworker? Or an unsympathetic politician? Why shoot at American soldiers?

Contrary to the media narrative, Lakanwal’s motives are not difficult to understand, especially given his training as a terroristic counter-terrorist. The Zero Units were trained in the use of violence to punish civilians suspected of collaborating with Taliban forces, to send a fearful message to the wider community to make them afraid. Don’t help the Taliban, or else.

In this case, the simplest working hypothesis —Occam’s razor— is that Lakanwal used his skills to plan and execute a terror operation. The next logical question is: who was his op intended to terrify? His most likely target was soldiers and U.S. security services; the attack was meant to destabilize the Trump crime crackdown, while minimizing civilian casualties and therefore civilian outrage.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed. In an article published this morning, Unherd observed that, because of the ambush, “newly on-edge guardsmen might overreact in their interactions with the public and use unnecessary force.”

Unherd explicitly noted that National Guardsmen will now be more fearful, which is perfectly understandable. “Guardsmen are only human … they will now be more wary of the public.” It ominously but correctly observed, “The possibility of miscalculation has grown significantly since Wednesday, through no fault of the National Guard.”

Last night, a CNN story reported, “For National Guard troops, the shootings raised immediate and traumatic questions over their safety and protection … suddenly the possible danger that comes with their mission has come into sharp focus.” And, “National Guard troops are highly visible — as seems to be Trump’s intent for deterrence purposes — but that can also leave them exposed.” They’re sitting ducks.

Finally, and more to the point, CNN noted that the incident “will raise counter-terrorism concerns over whether the alleged shooter had a motivation to target US soldiers directly and whether other attacks are possible.”

Thus, President Trump was not exaggerating when he labeled the shooting an act of terrorism. “America will never bend and never yield in the face of terror, and at the same time, we will not be deterred from the mission these service members were so nobly fulfilling,” Trump said.

The biggest unasked question on everyone’s mind is: was Lakanwal acting alone?

🔥 It was certainly curious timing. Within the same week as the ambush, six U.S. congressmen launched a high-profile video encouraging troops to defy “illegal orders.” In the days leading up to the release of that “illegal orders” video, several of the congressmen were making the rounds complaining about National Guard deployments. So it isn’t hard to figure out which illegal orders they were referring to.

Also during the same week, billboards began popping up near National Guard bases, prompting soldiers to ask whether ‘crime crackdown duty’ and immigration enforcement duty was worth it, and mocking them:

(On an aside, this seems like a good time to mention that, during the first years of the pandemic, the national billboard service companies refused to sell billboard space for messages questioning masks, vaccines, or pandemic policy. But never mind.)

The URL plastered on the new billboards leads to a website that, among other things, immediately encourages soldiers to evade surveillance:

So much for that old saw, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide. All of a sudden, Democrats discovered online privacy.

Anyway, the website offered to provide soldiers considering disobeying orders with free lawyers:

The site helpfully suggested two scenarios for National Guard soldiers to consider refusing “illegal” orders:

• “Use of military forces to carry out deportations, removals, or detention of immigrants.”

• “Use of military forces against civilian protesters.” (Presumably, Antifa.)

(In another section labeled “Outside the U.S.,” the website offered “attacks on vessels in international or foreign waters” as another potentially illegal order for our sailors to think about. Thomas Jefferson, who famously fought the Barbary Pirates, might like to offer a word here.)

🔥 Altogether, it’s quite a lot for our patriotic soldiers to take in. So far this week, we have seen three extraordinary but seemingly unconnected events:

1. Sitting senators and representatives strongly imply that Trump’s orders are illegal and should be refused.

2. A national billboard-and-website strategy promising to protect soldiers who refuse orders, by giving them free lawyers, and specifically identifying Trump’s immigration policies as potentially illegal.

3. The brazen, daylight assassination of at least one, and possibly two, soldiers who were following the kind of orders that the website dislikes, by a CIA-trained jihadist.

I am not saying these seemingly unrelated events are connected. But folks have noticed their uncanny temporal synchronicity. As Auric Goldfinger said in the eponymous 007 novel, “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and the third time it’s enemy action.”

I hope it’s not a seditious conspiracy. I pray that Lakanwal’s ambush was a one-off conducted by a mentally unwell, ex-special forces operator. We pray for the family of the slain soldier as well as for the miraculous healing of her injured squadmate. I will keep you updated with reliable information, as it develops.

Have a fantastic Friday! I’ll return tomorrow with a normal style roundup of the most essential news and unsparing but optimistic commentary.

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